CONFRONTATION IN THE GULF

CONFRONTATION IN THE GULF; U.S. Explores New Strategies to Limit Weapons of Mass Destruction

By MICHAEL WINES, Special to The New York Times

Published: September 30, 1990

WASHINGTON, Sept. 29—
Iraq's emergence as a regional superpower, bristling with missiles and chemical arms and close to producing nuclear ones, is prodding the Bush Administration to consider new strategies to stem the worldwide spread of mass-destruction weapons, according to Government officials.

Those strategies, known as fallback positions to some, spring from the growing conviction that some of the basic technologies needed to wage highly destructive wars, like the ability to build ballistic missiles and chemical weapons, have become too widespread to control easily.

Administration officials said the Persian Gulf crisis had led experts to press to achieve two new aims: to keep developing nations from acquiring technologies that could make their existing weapons even more lethal, and to dissuade their leaders from using the advanced arms, such as chemical weapons, that they already have.

''It's no longer enough to try to curb proliferation,'' a senior State Department official said in a recent interview, ''because in a number of cases proliferation has already occurred.''

Iraq's Strength Cited

While that idea is not novel, the gulf crisis has brought it home to policy makers with new force, officials said. Besides its ballistic missiles, chemical and possibly biological weapons and an active nuclear-bomb program, Iraq has amassed an armed force that experts say is the technological equal of NATO countries such as Italy, a nation with three times Iraq's population and 30 times its gross domestic product.

A chief concern is that technologies with military applications are moving into everyday use faster than the ability of Western nations to control their export. For example, computers used for such diverse purposes as regulating printing presses and reconciling checking accounts can be used to operate missile-launching sites, and guidance systems in commercial aircraft can be modified to guide ballistic missiles.

''The issue isn't really that these people have Scuds,'' said W. Seth Carus, a proliferation expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, referring to a crude short-range ballistic missile that the Soviet Union has sold to Iraq and about 20 other developing nations. ''The issue is that they know how to make Scuds. That means they no longer have to rely on Western technology.''

The Central Intelligence Agency has predicted that 20 developing nations will produce their own missiles within a decade. Already, Argentina, Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Iraq, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and South Africa produce or are close to producing their own missiles. Most also have nuclear weapons or advanced nuclear programs.

Nuclear Arms for Iraq

Many private experts and Israeli scientists believe Iraq will be able to produce a crude nuclear weapon in three to five years.

The missiles now in third-world inventories are too inaccurate to threaten specific enemy targets, arms experts say, and for now few such nations are believed able to launch a chemical or nuclear warhead with confidence that it will detonate on impact.

Nevertheless, experts in the transfer of military technology at the Central Intelligence Agency have begun an extensive assessment of the technical and scientific abilities of developing nations, an official said.

The Bush Administration has begun to dust off cold war arms-control policies, such as confidence-building agreements between hostile nuclear powers, for use in trouble spots.

''We need to focus more on what we can do, once weapons of mass destruction have proliferated, to build in fire bricks against their use,'' a senior official said. ''We need to talk more to the Soviets about it, and we need to talk to the Western Europeans about it.''

New Alliance Suggested

Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d suggested one cold war tack last August when he raised the prospect of a new military security alliance, along the lines of NATO, that would counterbalance Iraq. The Soviet Union proposed another in February 1989, when it called for a military threat-reduction center in the Middle East to detect and defuse potential conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

Some, even within the Administration, question the depth of this newfound devotion to third-world arms control. Those doubts were underscored this month, when the White House approved the export of parts for a new three-stage missile that Brazil is developing, despite compelling evidence that Brazil has shared missile and nuclear technology with Iraq.

Others say the idea that East-West arms control tactics will work in the Middle East is absurd.

Mideast Wars 'Endemic'

''There are slight differences between the cold war and the Middle East,'' Mr. Carus said. ''In the worst of the cold war, the United States and the Soviet Union talked to each other. There are a number of countries in this region that don't even talk to each other covertly.''

''And despite our tensions, the U.S. and the Soviets never fought a war,'' he said. ''In the Middle East, wars are endemic.''